Research Interests
I am currently Reader in French and Editor of our side of French and German Publications, a thriving in-house imprint responsible over the last dozen years for some ninety volumes and fifty-four thousand sales. My aim is, without fuss and the inbuilt delays of most publications series, to bring out authors' works as quickly as possible in uncomplicated, but tolerably elegant, typographical settings.

Not that this leaves me no time at all for my own academic interests and enthusiasms. They include my major specialism, the works of Zola: I edited the Bulletin of the Émile Zola Society from 1993 to 2000, and have written a study of Animality in the Works of Zola (unpublished Leicester Ph.D., 1976). My specific interest in Zola at the time of the Dreyfus Affair led to Rostand, and I have produced an edition of Cyrano de Bergerac (Bristol Classical Press, 1994). I have also written widely on aspects of penology and philanthropy in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, and was able to present many of my findings in the notes to a translation, Victor Hugo, The Last Day of a Condemned Man (Oxford University Press, 'World's Classics', 1992). I enjoy narratology, in aspects that I attempt to bring to the attention of undergraduate students at an appropriate level. My major twentieth-century author, with whom I have both intellectual and emotional affinities born of his preoccupation with family history, is Jean Rouaud, on whom I have delivered conference papers and written two major articles.